Moldova’s Constitutional Court has ruled that members of Shor, the populist, pro-Russian party founded by Moldovan billionaire Ilan Shor, will be able to run again in elections in the country. Shor was declared illegal in June 2023, when a court found that the party had paid people to provoke protests and riot attempts in Moldova: in October the Moldovan parliament voted to change the electoral law and ban party members illegal to run for three years. Now the Constitutional Court he established that the changes to the electoral law are unconstitutional because they were approved without allowing amendments to be proposed.
As a consequence, Shor members will be able to stand in both the presidential elections in the autumn of 2024 and the parliamentary elections scheduled for July next year.
Moldova has been an independent country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; it borders Ukraine to the east and Romania to the west and includes Transnistria, a pro-Russian region that has long proclaimed its independence. Ilan Shor, businessman and party leader, is considered very close to Russia. In 2017 he had been sentenced to 7 and a half years in prison for fraud and laundering of one billion, three years earlier. In 2019, while awaiting the appeal, he took refuge in Israel, where he still lives. In April 2023 his sentence was doubled.
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